Jürg Tschopp

Jürg Tschopp (born 1951 in Basel — died 22 March 2011 in the Swiss Alps) was a Swiss biochemist, known for his research on apoptosis and the immunology of inflammation. His greatest achievement was perhaps his team's discovery and scientific description of the inflammasome (which he named).

Biography Tschopp studied chemistry with his 1974 Diplom thesis supervised by Joachim Seelig at the Biozentrum University of Basel. There Tschopp received in 1979 his doctorate in biophysics under the supervision of Jürgen Engel. As a postdoc Tschopp was supervised by Hans J. Müller-Eberhard at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. There with colleagues he showed "that the lytic pore of complement was formed by C9 multimers." At the University of Lausanne, Tschopp became an assistant professor in 1982, an associate professor in 1987, and a full professor in 1990 in the biochemistry department. Since 2003 he was a co-director of the biochemistry department.

Tschopp's group, and other groups, established that mutations in the gene for the protein NLRP3, also known as cryopyrin, (one of the proteins forming the inflammasome) cause cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome (CAPS), which is a group of rare autoimmune disorders. Patients with CAPS are "now successfully treated with IL-1 antagonists such as anakinra or blocking antibodies." He was the author or co-author of more than 350 publications. Tschopp received several awards, including the European Cell Death Organization's Career Award in 2006, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2008, and the Novartis Prize for Clinical Immunology (shared with Charles Dinarello) in 2010.

Selected publications